Incoming CSE Ph.D. Student at the University of Washington
Pronouns: she/her/hers
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I'm an incoming Computer Science & Engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Washington. My research area lies at the intersection of Programming Languages, Software Engineering, and Computing Education. I received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Northwestern University.
I'm passionate about Computing Education, Programming Languages and Software Engineering, and more! I'm especially interested in the programming systems and software engineering tools that learners, data scientists, scientists, and other non-computer scientists and end-user programmers use when interacting with computing, learning, programming, and software engineering. I aspire to study and design programming systems that are approachable and understandable to all users and that empower people to safely, efficiently, and easily use computing and write programs that take full advantage of the computing technology available to them to achieve their goals.
I'm also very interested in how computing education, especially for non-computer scientists. I'm interested in studying what skills are hard for new programmers to learn and how we as computing educators can build off of learners' prior knowledge and backgrounds to effectively teach computing topics and techniques relevant to each individual learner's goals. I'm also curious how recent advances in software engineering technology may require computing educators to focus on aspects of computing other than writing code—for example: reading, understanding, and testing software. I believe that this goal is synergistic with my research interests in programming languages and software engineering.
In my free time, I love reading, world-building, traveling, biking, and playing and especially GMing TTRPGs. My favorite genres are fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction more broadly. Some of my favorite authors include Christopher Ruocchio, Ursula K LeGuin, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Brandon Sanderson, and J.R.R. Tolkien. As of 11 June 2024, I am reading A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
If any of this seems interesting to you, I'd love to connect!
Feel free to reach out to me at elli.beres+web@u.northwestern.edu.
